Opening up new land on the island turned out to be a lot more work than I had expected. Clearing out space for the road was easy with magic, and I had plenty of physical stamina too. But, it was simply a long way to go. A distance that took me or Elga thirty minutes to run was, in terms of my previous life, like constructing a highway.
“With this, I think we’re around a tenth of the way there,” I said.
“Phew... That’s just cutting down trees? This is going to take a while,” Reina said.
It had already been three days of work, and this was the result. I casually cut down the trees with magic, and I left the more detailed work to Reina. We were prioritizing clearing land first before getting started on paving the ground. It looked like this all would take a significant amount of time.
“Yeah, you can say that again,” I said. “Even in my past life, building roads wasn’t easy, even with lots of people and heavy machinery.”
“Machinery?”
“They’re like tools that move on their own, basically.”
“Huh... Are they like artifacts or magic items?”
Those words were inundated with a sense of fantasy. To be honest, I was a bit curious, but right now I wanted to prioritize building the road.
“How are Zelos and Merlyn?” I asked.
“They ran out of mana a long time ago. Honestly, it might be getting rough for me too.”
“I see... Then, let’s call it a day here.”
Glancing at the forest, it was still overgrown, and forging ahead would be tough. I would be fine pushing further further, but it would no doubt be difficult on the others, both physically and magically. However, it had gotten much easier to walk on the part of the road we had already finished clearing. After all this, we would start work on flattening out the bumpy road, but considering the rate things were going already, that would be impossible for some time.
“I got a lot of dirt on me, so I really want to take a bath,” Reina said.
“Good idea. You must be sweaty too, right? I’ll get the bath started, so you can go get ready.”
“Really? I suppose I’ll take you up on your offer, then.”
The sun was still high in the sky, but it was nice to have a day like this every once in a while. This world wasn’t a place where we had specific daily tasks we needed to complete. Every day, we woke up, had fun, worked, and slept as we pleased, because that was something we could do here.
To be honest, I could probably complete this development at a faster pace if I was working alone. I doubted there was any limit to my mana, and my body never got fatigued either. If I just sped along to the end and finished the whole thing, it would definitely be quite fast. But I didn’t do that, simply because it wouldn’t be fun to do everything by myself. I wanted to enjoy a casual everyday life, whether that meant doing something together with Reina, or getting to know Zelos and Merlyn better.
“I mean, I reincarnated here. It’s fine for me to use this opportunity to be just a bit selfish.”
I quietly whispered to myself as I stared at the back of the beautiful girl walking ahead of me.